They're Dirty Jobs But Someone Has To Do Them

Many people complain about their jobs on a regular basis - but, remember, it could be worse - far worse. While the hands-dirty role of central bank head or SEC chair are taken, the following infographic highlights jobs and salaries that really resonate with the phrase "there are dirty jobs but somebody’s got to do it." From garbage collector to crime scene cleanup technician and from proctologists to parents -- which stomach-turning jobs will have you running for the shower the minute you get home?

There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multimillion dollar machines.

They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past.

The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a particular component of the machine and stated, "This is where your problem is".

The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again.

The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges.

The engineer responded briefly: One chalk mark $1 Knowing where to put it $49,999 It was paid in full and the engineer retired again in peace.

Engineers like to think they understand the world better than most... yet they're usually working for someone else and many times that someone else is government or a company in a government subsidized industry.

Bean counters can take something working perfectly fine and transform it into a pile of smoldering rubble in seconds...keeps the mechanics, firefighters, electricians and engineers in work though...lol.

Skateboarder chose to be broke for a year and a half after college rather than work dishonorably at the expense of his dignity (and his parents housed him and helped him out for the year). It took me a while to find a non-gub non-corporatist non-speical-interest non-evil-doing non-handholdy non-pipelined job as an R&D product designer of hardware and software alike. Very small group, gets projects based on word-of-mouth, weathered both the dot-com and the 2007 busts.

I start work in a couple of weeks.

I also owe the local homeless guy who travels between the two local 7-11s a pack of cigarettes. I usually ask him what he wants when I hit up the 7-11 and get him a drink. Last time he really wanted a pack of smokes. Told him I'd buy him a pack when I got my first paycheck. Fuck your generalization. There are real engineers left, though not many.

Thank you guys. It broke my balls upon entering industry to find that the default option for engineers is to participate in evil. It is actually quite difficult to find engineering work that relatively minimizes your evil footprint. I weep for my mechanical/aerospace friends (now under custody of Lockheed, Northrop, Livermore, et al.) who can't ever leave the gub-space. Once you go that route, that's all you will ever do.

I got out of aerospace shortly after getting out of college. Working on weapons systems didn't spook me too bad back then (I worked on more defensive stuff anyhow), but I could not take the beaucracy and the painfully slow design processes.

I don't know what part of the states (if even) you reside in. But rest assured, the defense industry is not the default. When I graduated nobody went to work for Bell/Lockheed/L3. They were all over our career fairs, internship programs and they all had locations 10 miles or less from the campus. Word had gotten around about exactly what CL is referring to....endless bureaucracy, projects for less than honorable intentions. Not what most of us got into engineering for.

DW is just some sad azzhat who wants to make generalizations about a group of people he knows very little about. I worked with an old guy who told me it was the engineer's job to improve the human condition. DW has had his condition improved, he just fails to recognize it.

Funny, all of the above jobs were (in some form) once considered an integral part of what used to be called "life". Cleaning up your own mess or caring for an aged parent?....who does that shit anymore?

What's worse is that our government and culture now consider most of these jobs (along with most jobs I've had in my life) as beneath the dignity of a white person (or white American person - I forget what the reasoning is).

But I'm sure that keeping America's lazy, entitled kids on the sofa and plugged into their Idevices is the right trade here.

Luxury! We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!

Cattle, pigs - no problem, but cleaning and plucking a chicken - once was enough (worse than cleaning their coop on a hot summer afternoon). Raising livestock from small to table gives a real sense of one's place in the grand scheme - also leads to a twisted sense of humor when comparing steaks from different calves raised to abattoirage (giving them their own names really upped the ante).

Garbage collectors, dirty job? LOL! The collectors I pay dearly for never leave the seat of their truck as the magic hand reaches out to touch that dirty something.. crap, this is going the wrong direction. Automation, bitchez!

The garbage men in your area are blessed. My husband has been a garbage collector for almost 30 years and has been pushing for automation in our area for the last 10. Some days he's more odiferous than others. Depends on what routes he has to do. The one thing he absolutely hates is picking up McDonalds' garbage compacters. Those are the days he wishes he was in the Roto Rooter business. Told me flat out that he'd rather smell shit than the old food sludge from there.

A friend of mine was a guest of the State of Washington .... and worked his way into a kitchen job as butcher .... he said the Washington Highway Dept. crews would bring the choice road kills to his "facility" !

The New Economics Foundation did a study in 2009 called "A Bit Rich", calculating the real value to society of 6 different professions.

Quote from the study:

High-earning investment bankers in the City of London are among the best remunerated people in the economy. But the earnings they command and the profits they make come at a huge cost because of the damaging social effects of the City of London’s financial activities. We found that rather than being ‘wealth creators’, these City bankers are being handsomely rewarded for bringing the global financial system to the brink of collapse. While collecting salaries of between £500,000 and £10 million, leading City bankers to destroy £7 of social value for every pound in value they generate.

Both for families and for society as a whole, looking after children could not be more important. As well as providing a valuable service for families, childcare workers release earnings potential by allowing parents to continue working. They also unlock social benefits in the shape of the learning opportunities that children gain outside the home. For every £1 they are paid, childcare workers generate between £7 and £9.50 worth of benefits to society.

Moneybookers Buster Job .... I was having a problem getting my Skrill account verified so I could withdraw a modest sum ! I was informed that since the money came from an internet gambling site I wouldn't be able to withdraw the funds to a US bank accout ! I sent all the docs they asked for and was getting no where ! BTW the money was from a friend ! Then in desperation I said: " I'm Monedas ....!" ! No, I didn't say that ! I said I was a regular contributor to ZH and I was going to tell my story ! The account was verified in a couple of hours and the money is on it's way ! ZH .... don't leave home without it !

I worked for a family produce business and in the summers we would unload watermelons packed loosely from tractor trailers into giant cardboard boxes. Packed in filthy straw, dirt and sand everywhere, decayed watermelons that you would try to pick up and they would explode all over you, maggots, 180 degrees inside the closed trucks in mid-summer, mice and even a couple snakes. Sometimes my friends and I would toss the decayed watermelons at each other in order to desensitize ourselves... the smell was indescribably nauseating.

RICH Economy step 1:Offer a prize of $50,000/year to any worker that designs a machine/software/process that will replace him/her. Offer an additional prize of $30,000/year to ALL OTHER WORKERS that get replaced.

Answering conservative objections:

1. A machine works 24/7, thereby tripling output immediately.2. Machines do not take sick leave.3. Machines are never late for work.4. Machines do not form unions and constantly ask for higher wages and more fringe benefits.5. Machines do not take vacations.6. Machines do not harbor grudges and foul up production in sneaky, undetectable ways.7. Cybernation was advancing every decade anyway, despite the opposition of Unions, government, and other Alpha males; it was better to have huge populations celebrating the reward of $30K to $50K/year for group cleverness than huge populations suffering the humiliation of welfare.8. With production rising due to Cybernation, consumers were needed and a society on welfare was a society of very meager consumers.

The majority of the unemployed, living comfortably on $30k/year, spent most of their time drinking, smoking, engaging in primate sexual acrobatics and watching TV. When Moralists complained that this was a subhuman existence, Hubbard answered, "And what kind of existence did they have doing idiot jobsthat machines do better?" [/quote] -- R.A. Wilson